124 Book Reviews

Federico Palomo, ed. La memoria del mundo: clero, erudición y cultura escrita en el mundo ibérico (siglos xvi-xvii). : Servicios de Publicaciones, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2014. Pp. 262. Pb, 18 euros.

Federico Palomo begins his introduction to anejo (supplement) xiii of Cuadernos de historia moderna with an evocative episode: the 1602 visit in which three Augustinian presented Shah Abbas of Persia with a beauti- fully bound, illustrated life of Christ. As Palomo explains, this encounter, and the many others that followed a similar pattern, powerfully demonstrate the prominent place the written word occupied in the missionary experience. In addition to the mentioned in the introduction, the volume’s ten essays consider , Jesuits, Hieronymites, Dominicans, and Orato­ rians, as well as Carmelite, Benedictine, and Conceptionist . While one might conclude from the title that the collection focuses on European clerics who evangelized in their countries’ colonies, the essays include a myriad of peregrinations and textual interactions, including collecting printed matter. Fernando Bouza’s contribution details the previously underestimated inter- est of book professionals in financing editions of religious texts. As Bouza’s archival examples demonstrate, men of the cloth did not necessarily distance themselves from the financial details of the publishing process. Moreover, while religious communities valued the intellectual and material content of texts, they were not indifferent to their economic value. In 1609, both the Jesuits and Hieronymites sought to use book collections as negotiable currency to purchase the Valladolid property of the bankrupt bookseller Martín de Córdoba. Bouza’s previous research on how handwritten texts continued to serve important functions even after the printing press became common, underpins several studies of the circulation of manuscripts. Paul Nelles’s essay traces the evolution of Jesuit practices for sharing edifying news with other Jesuit com- munities in the sixteenth century; the time required to hand-copy letters in forced this practice to evolve. José Luis Betrán Moya examines missionary texts produced by Jesuits in the Peruvian Amazon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Betrán Moya’s research, these Jesuits circulated handwritten narratives about their experiences to prepare fellow missionaries for their jobs. Printed works about the order’s efforts in Peru served different functions, including securing financial patronage or political support. While missionary journeys inspired the previously mentioned manuscripts, travel was not a prerequisite for writing. In studying the epistolary production

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Book Reviews 125 of nuns, Antonio Castillo Gómez notes that Carmelite nuns were prolific letter writers. He hypothesizes that this level of epistolary production followed the model established by Teresa of Ávila. Other female orders nonetheless pro- duced notable letter writers, including the Benedictine Benedicta Teresa and the Conceptionist María de Ágreda. According to Carlos Alberto González Sánchez’s research, travellers were advised to read, or listen to works read aloud, in order to avoid temptations, like games of chance, during lengthy ocean voyages. Travelling clerics minis- tered to passengers and crew, and thus made their time onboard part of their missionary work. González Sánchez’s essay includes a number of examples of travellers who transported book collections, but texts sometimes embarked on their own journeys. Such is the case of the personal library of the Portuguese Oratorian Diogo Barbosa Machado (1682–1772). After the collection was donated to the Portuguese royal library, as Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro details, the volumes accompanied the Portuguese court to Brazil. Bentes Monteiro argues that Barbosa Machado’s albums of leaflets and some 1,382 engraved portraits, now housed in Brazil’s National Library, represent the Oratorian’s attempt to create a history of his era. Rather than travel from the Old World to the New, the subject of Ângela Barreto Xavier’s study, Miguel da Purificação, born in India to Portuguese parents, journeyed to Rome, Madrid, and in the 1630s. As this Franciscan travelled to negotiate jurisdictional matters for his province, he chronicled his journey and the legal issues that motivated his trip in a text printed in in 1640. Barreto Xavier indicates that Purificação’s writings offered a Franciscan response to the large body of texts about Jesuit missions in Asia. This is not the only evidence that religious orders did not work col- laboratively to gain new adherents. Like Purificação, Friar Paulo da Trindade, another Franciscan chronicler of the order’s missions in the Far East, was intent on highlighting his community’s work. Accordingly, as Zoltán Bierdermann demonstrates, Trindade, who was born in Macao, sacrifices spatial elements in favor of temporal ones in his Conquista espiritual do Oriente (written in the 1630s and circulated in manuscript form; first printing Lisboa: Centro de Estudios Históricos Ultramarinos, 1962–67), in order to differentiate the evan- gelization efforts of the Order of Friars Minor from those of the Society of Jesus. In the eighteenth century, the publications of the Franciscan lay brother Friar Apolinário da Conceiçao—the focus of Federico Palomo’s essay—caused controversy in his community because of Conceiçao’s status: generally, lay brothers dedicated themselves to domestic tasks, not to writing. Some of Conceiçao’s texts circulated in manuscript form, and the lay brother collected

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126 Book Reviews alms to finance the printing of other texts. Since there was no printing press in Brazil when Conceiçao resided there, he travelled to Lisbon to print his works. Like the Franciscan community, the Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits evangelized in Iberian colonies in the Americas and in Asia. Antonella Romano’s essay considers how these religious communities’ printed and man- uscript accounts of missions to China brought China to the attention of mid- sixteenth century Europeans. Although many studies of early modern Luso-Hispanic culture have adopted the term “Iberian worlds” to more ably describe the potential for syncretism between European interests and the autochthonous cultures that existed to colonization, this volume’s use of the singular “el mundo ibérico” (the Iberian world) aptly represents the collection’s concerns. While Romano’s essay briefly discusses Matteo Ricci’s study of Chinese, and González Sánchez mentions that Jesuits learned Quechua onboard vessels bound for the Americas, syncretic mnemonic or religious practices are not analyzed in detail. The male European cultural sphere is the focus of this collection; only Castillo Gómez considers nuns’ writing, despite the substantial number of female reli- gious communities in Iberian colonies. Nonetheless, the collection offers solid, sometimes compelling analyses, and the archival research that informs the essays unearths often-surprising information for readers interested in Catholicism in the Iberian world.

Patricia W. Manning University of Kansas [email protected] DOI 10.1163/22141332-00301005-13

journal of jesuitDownloaded studies from Brill.com09/27/20213 (2016) 85-189 02:14:01AM via free access